Everyone has a story. Tamsen Courtenay spent months listening to the stories of homeless people living on the streets of central London during winter 2016. Interview by Nicola Baird
Tamsen Courtenay, author of Four Feet Under, a collection of interviews about life on the street. (c) Islington Faces
“I’m a chronicler, not a campaigner,” explains Tamsen Courtenay when we meet who has a way of making you feel like you’ve known her forever as a close friend – at one stage in the interview she grabs my arm to emphasise a point which makes it impossible for me to take notes. It’s no act: even in her book’s acknowledgments she thanks each reader as “someone who has soul, humanity and enough interest and compassion to have bought and read this book.”
Tamsen has chiefly worked in TV and current affairs. She is now based in central Italy but has come back to the famous Highbury Barn pub to talk about her most recent investigation – the crowdfunded book, Four Feet Under charting 30 people’s stories about life on the street in central London. The book begins with her staying at a friend’s place in Highbury. “I left in the morning and walked down through Highbury Fields and to the West End,” says Tamsen explaining that whenever she saw someone sleeping rough she’d ask them about their life. However, she had one rule: “I’d never wake anyone up.”
“I had an idea about what I wanted to find out from the people who are hidden in plain sight on the streets of London. I wanted to ask ‘how did you get here,’ and potentially get different answers. I wanted to allow their voice to be made louder. Homeless people have a voice, but nobody bloody listens,” she says with real fury.
By the end of the project, Four Feet Under is a powerful collection of 30 people explaining what it’s like living on London’s streets. Their voice has been captured in conversation by Tamsen “on camera and a cheap recorder”. These edited monologues are interweaved with Tamsen’s feedback, enabling the reader to capture the interviewee’s voice and the author’s “celebration and lamentation” for what’s happening right now, tonight in Islington and across London (and many other cities).
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3 places that Tasmen Courtenay remembers well in Islington
- Tamsen’s first London home was above one of the Highbury Barn dry cleaners back in the 1980s. “The rooms were dreadful.”
- “My memory of Highbury Barn pub is it’s where my hair caught fire…” she says gesturing an imaginary candle in the dining area.
- Highbury Fields is another world. People love it, but it was a strange feeling walking through the relative affluence of Highbury Fields where people have expensive houses with beautiful windows and families snuggled up inside by the central heating. Very soon after that the pavements have got bodies on them.
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The interviews with a builder, a transgender woman, people in and out of work, and even a child show how different homeless people’s stories until they reach the street where they are so often just ignored by the people passing by. In the book many really enjoy talking to Tamsen, even while they are explaining how tough life is as a rough sleeper in central London.
Their stories are so tragic, and Tamsen so empathetic, that the experience was tough for her. She was banned from MacDonald’s off Trafalgar Square and gets into a number of fights with jobsworths.
One of the interviews is with Tim Wright, who many people pass when he is at Highbury Corner. His childhood is the stuff of nightmares, and over at 14 when his mum and “arsehole” stepdad simply “got up and moved to Wisbech… they didn’t leave me with a penny.” Tamsen has made a point of keeping her interviews as long reads so that you understand a person’s back story, so Islington Faces urges you to download the book Four Feet Under and read Tim’s full story.
Although Tamsen finds that she had “grown to like feeling adrift and invisible… (and) no one had any expectations of me at all,” the process took its toll. “It was exhausting,” she explains. “I walked miles and I got a horrific chest infection, and a kidney infection, from sitting on the cold, damp, chilled pavements. I got very tired breathing in the pollution as week after week I was breathing in car fumes. It felt especially filthy as I live in a clean, fresh environment with mountain air.”
“There was also emotional fatigue. The prism I began to see London through was lower, it was about suffering and also courage. My whole experience of London was from a perspective down there, on the street, and it’s a shitty environment,” continues Tamsen. “I’d feel their rage and exhaustion.”
Tamsen is reluctant to speak for anyone homeless pointing out that: “Homeless people are not an homogenous group – they have different senses of humour and different political views.”
But she wanted the book to have a power for the good. Already several of the photo portraits have been on show at Bad Behaviour art collective’s “ideal home” show raising money for the Pavement magazine (a magazine for rough sleepers and the insecurely housed).
Readers have been impressed too. “I’ve had hundreds of contacts from people who’ve read Four Feet Under saying ‘it’s changed me’,” she says. “They say “I read it, I get it. It’s changed the way I relate to homeless people. Anyone whose read it has had some kind of reaction but unless there is a sea-change I can’t see how this will go away. It’s not a society that looks after its vulnerable.”
If you have any curiosity in what life’s like on the streets you should certainly read this book, you can of course also talk to the people you pass by on your morning commute. If there’s one thing you can learn from reading Four Feet Under it is that nothing is more disempowering than being treated as if you are invisible – it’s shaming and cruel.
- Four Feet Under: 30 untold stories of homelessness in London (ebook approx £3 and hardback approx £13), available from https://www.amazon.co.uk/Tamsen-Courtenay/e/B07G4DX3RL/ref=dp_byline_cont_ebooks_1
- Four Feet Under was crowdfunded and published by Unbound, a publisher based in Wharf Road, Islington. It has linked 160,000 book lovers from 176 countries and their £5 million to fund books like Tamsen Courtenay’s Four Feet Under. https://unbound.com
